


Forty Six and Two (Are Just Ahead of Me)

by Bramblepelt



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Body Horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:00:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28820379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bramblepelt/pseuds/Bramblepelt
Summary: The final incoherent, rambling thoughts of a man who would defy the Kings, the Gods, and Death.
Kudos: 7





	Forty Six and Two (Are Just Ahead of Me)

**Author's Note:**

> I wanna feel the change consume me  
> Feel the outside turning in  
> I wanna feel the metamorphosis and  
> Cleansing I've endured within

They have no idea.

They stand there and applaud, praise him, revel in his accomplishments and breakthroughs. They swarm to his side, parasites squirming in their own filth desperate for a new feast. Reaching to him for a taste of something new, something fresh, that will allow their worthless little lives to continue on for just one more day. They thank him for the banquet of blood he lets. Their gratitude is a mask, shielding their derision. 

He knows they wretch the moment he turns. They take what he gives because he is the only one who will. The only one who can. They take all he has to give and resent him for the gift. They whisper in the halls how rancid he tastes, how burnt and sour his blood feels on their tongues. And still they smile and beg for more. Once more. For one more day.

Save us, Verstael! Oh you, who has felled the Glacian. You, who has secured our military force. You, who has looked upon the Lucians and decreed they will weaken and falter and fall under your blood. You, Verstael, who has done more for Niflheim than every Emperor who sat upon the throne, combined.

They have no idea what he’s found.

Chromosomes. The very foundation of the structure of all organic life. Invisible, toiling in the nucleus of every cell, every piece of every being that breathes and eats and shits exists in the way they do because of these. A sperm meets an egg, their chromosomes combine and split, and soon there is new life. A new prospect. 

A human is made of forty six chromosomes, or twenty three pairs. Every human, destined for the same fate as every other human, to live the same life, to grow and stagnate and decay in the exact same way given no other outside variables, all because of twenty three pairs. 

Twenty two of those pairs are autosomes. These tiny bits of genetic string look the same, no matter which human you rip apart and observe, delicately, under a microscope. Each one numbered, separated based on their size. The load of genetic material differs from each. But every human being has them, in the exact same size, in the exact same pairing. There is nothing inherently different, unique, special about the containers that hold our genetic codes. 

Nothing. 

Dissolve a man down to his most vital, most basic ones and zeroes, and all you have left is indistinguishable from his neighbor. Simply forty four little autosomes. This one says, you have green eyes. This one says, you have dark skin. This one says, should you eat well you shall grow tall. This one says, your ears shall curve slightly more than hers.

Ah! But humanity, in all its seething and selfish splendor, was not content allowing forty four autosomes to control their fate. No, the forty four which determine your physical and mental range of ability from birth to death was simply not enough. They had to create new limitations, new structures, new laws of fate that existed beyond what our code decided for us. Humanity, so sure of its mastery over its own destiny, enforced new boundaries that never needed to exist. New laws imposed upon each new human life, based solely on those other two chromosomes. 

The sex chromosomes. The ones that, upon visible evidence of inclusion within one’s code, decided whether one would be a man, or a woman. So binary, so short sighted, so very very unnecessary. Rather than allow each human to test and stretch and break through the barriers of their own code, humanity decided to lock each life into a box. The very first attempt to categorize, separate, impose upon themselves an invisible label that held all of them back. 

And they did not stop there, oh no. Skin color. Eye shape. Hair texture. Far from satisfied allowing the two to define one’s life, the other forty four were put on trial as well. 

And borders were drawn. Wars were fought. An endless cycle of birth and death, made all the more painful, worthless, wasted by a fear and misunderstanding of forty four and two.

Forty four and two.

That which decides how your mortal coil shall look and function during your life, shall also decide where you fall in this incredible undertaking called society. So many little bags of forty four and twos, existing together, within these rules set by something far less powerful than nature.

And the Gods. They looked down upon this madness, this ignorant writhing pressure to be, to conform, to fit into one’s designated box. The Gods saw all of this and allowed it to continue. Allowed their creations to throw away the gifts they were given, and pull each other like crabs in a bucket back into the misery and pain that was decided for themselves by generations so long dead. 

The Gods allowed this. And then they went on to encourage it.

How dare they?

To look upon your own creations, see them refusing to live up to their own potential, refusing to stretch their coding as far as it will give until they could break it, until they could evolve into the next. To look upon this, and not correct them, but to draw further borders, create more boundaries of ability. To grace only one with the power to move beyond their genetic code. To allow only to hold in their hands that which commanded the fire and water and sands of life itself. 

The Gods graced this to only one, who held the correct combination of forty four and two. And in doing so, they drew their lines. They drew their borders. They drew the rope Verstael would tie into a noose, and end their careless authority.

Forty four and two soon would no longer define him, or anyone else. If the Gods refused to encourage it, and humanity refused to acknowledge it, then Verstael himself would achieve it. He would evolve, leave every other creature choking in the dust. No Gods, no Emperors, no Kings or immortals could begin to touch what he would become. It was so close. Just ahead of him. What he’d been looking for, pining for, spending every waking moment free from duty grasping for.

They had no idea what he’d found.

Forty six and two.

Such a small change. Such a seemingly insignificant little addition. And yet it held within it’s numbers the answer to everything. Break free! Melt away the chains wracking against your ankles, digging into your skin until nothing but scabs on bone remain. Slice through the smallest parts of you, open the flesh and veins and let the change consume you! 

Evolve. 

Move forward. 

Taste the sweet chaos of a life unburdened by delusions of limitations. Abandon that which has forced you to stagnate, decompose. While your cellular structure refuses to continue on, death and rebirth replaced with only the finality of destruction, do not sit idly by and allow it.

Do not go so easily into the calming arms of Death. Turn her away, refuse her hand. 

Ah but they’d tried. They found the tiny switch that could keep the cells from dying in the first place. But the rebirth did not cease, and thus, disease. Rather than dying from inevitable entropy, they died choking on their own fluid. A violent, crushing murder committed without a thought of mercy by the hand of their own flesh. 

Truly, this was not the answer.

And then, the war. One that had truly never stopped or began again. It had always raged, back and forth, a mad scramble for power that could never truly satisfy. A small drop of tomorrow’s possibilities on the cracked and arid tongue of the man who had everything. Thirsty for more. Willing to crawl on his belly through burning sands to take it. If only he would look inwards, reflect instead on the power he already had. That which existed in his veins, just bursting to show. To prove. To offer a cold, full glass of eternity.

But then, the war, simmering so gently, finally reached its boiling point. Steaming up, condensing into the sky, burning until there was nothing left but the pot. Burnt, warped, useless. 

The war. If he wanted to find eternity, he had to first find the money. Resources. Drones with working hands. And to find that, he had to find the power. The sway. The words to pull an Emperor’s ears closer and closer. He first had to waste his little time contributing to the Emperor’s war. Push back the Lucians. Claim their lands. Kill a goddess. 

He created the war machine, turning cogs that powered a destructive force meant only to consume, to grind blood and bone through its teeth and feast. With the practiced gluttony of a King who had never been denied a single want, the machine marched forward endlessly with little resistance. Devouring the innocent and guilty alike, old and young, rich and poor, anything that stood in front of its slobbering maw was ripped from their coil. Ripped from their box. Thrashed aside from the rules and laws and boundaries of man, once again nothing but forty four and two.

He’d done it. The machine, it fed from his own blood. He nursed it, drop by small little drop. The first step towards eternity, remaking oneself again and again. Recreating those exact same forty six chromosomes, eternally without end. A perfect creation, born to die. Nothing else to strive for, live for, breathe for. Stand up, join the machine, feast, die. The very embodiment of everything that is humanity, boiled down to its very essence, its very limits.

His very essence, his limits.

No more.

He’d found it, finally. Crawling in the shadows. Feasting just as well, snapping spines and melting flesh until the creature it devoured was reborn anew. He found it. The next two.

The scourge. A disease. Splitting and recreating, reforming in its own image, dissolving itself into the code and adding to it. Changing it. Becoming it.

The scourge was the catalyst for the mutation. What was once nothing more than philosophical debate amongst those who had long pondered the boundaries of forty six was now within his grasp. Just ahead of him. 

The demons. The end result of the scourge filing itself neatly into the space between the host’s genetic code. 

The demons had all forty six chromosomes found in the human makeup. And two more.

Such a slight change, such an immense result. The wealth of information that could be found swimming in those microscopic little tubes. It gnawed at him, clawed at his thoughts, fingernails raw and bloodied and ripped off digging into his skull for a chance to simply peek through the length of the G, the T, the A, and the C. Watch those lovely repeating patterns stretch and bend and flow into something so much more than him. So much more than any human.

His own blood had replicated, fed and birthed exact copies. He fed those copies, in turn, to the scourge. You are the first. You are the next. You have been chosen to evolve. What did that make him, if not a God? He created a new life form in his own image, allowed it to change and thrive, and sent it away to decimate all which would have it ended. The very base nature of organic life; if one seeks to cut yours short, you must cut them first. Survive. Feast. Breed. Die. Then turn to what stands behind you, and cut down any who would stifle your success. 

If humanity could choose to move forward.

Choose to live. And to kill and die and multiply and sing and eat and grow and crush and scream and steal and give and feel and pick at the scabs that have formed around your ankles underneath the crushing shackle wearing into your bones.

But they would not. He knew this to be true.

They had no idea what he knew.

Eternal life.

He was no fool. He knew precisely how foolish the notions of immortality, the thought experiments of graduate students high off their own achievements, were in the grander scheme. Ah yes, if only I could upload my consciousness to a computer. Clone my body. Transfer my mind to a robot. Something that could live forever, or at least so much longer than my forty six would allow.

This was no immortality. This was a copy. While the other you, the fake you, continued to live on you, the original, would age, suffer, and die all the same. The idea of you lived on of course, but either way, accomplish enough, spark the right change, rule with proper ferocity, and your silhouette would continue on endlessly. A paler shade of immortality. This was not what he had in mind.

Consider the caterpillar, who lives by its genetic code just the same as any creature. It wraps itself into its box, and emerges much later as something completely new. It does not accomplish this by simply improving upon its original design. It does not grow as a fetus in a womb grows. Oh no, the caterpillar dissolves. It melts into its most basic miasma, until the form of the original creature is gone. Left behind. And now, something new. Something that could achieve so much more than the caterpillar could ever dream of. The butterfly emerges, and now, it can fly.

Does the caterpillar retain its mind? Does it remember? Does it recall the life it abandoned in search of something greater? 

Yes.

They’d tested it, proved it. Expose the caterpillar to a painful stimulus, repeatedly, until it learns to avoid it. Allow it to change, evolve, become greater. And now watch, as the butterfly continues to avoid the pain.

It remembers.

He will remember.

He will combine with the catalyst. He will look forward with eyes open, arms outstretched, prepared to dissolve into the precious liquid of life itself, and then he will reform. Retain. Reveal.

He will remember. The men who begged for his blood only to spit in disgust at the taste. The men who sat high on their thrones for that sweet drop of nothingness to quench an unending thirst. The Gods who watched as they all crawled en masse through the squalor of an existence filled with pointless limitations forced upon their forty four and two.

Pointless.

Listen, now. Can you hear it?

A practiced motion. The needle to the finger. The catch of the drip. The muscle memory that guides his hand over every button, switch, and lever. This, the final time he will retain this tactile response. The slight pressure, the pain, the stretching of muscle fiber over bone, under flesh, all signals of electricity running through his nerves to his brain.

Don’t do this.

Please, discontinue doing that.

Move away.

Stop, before the damage cannot be undone.

Survive.

What did this decaying body know of survival? It would twist and scream at the invasion, the burning, the splicing and devouring. It would know only the torture of the death of the old ways. The only way it knew. It was an illusion, one final hurdle to test and mark his ascension. 

It was time. Step into the shadow. Let it stretch over this defunct form. Clear the way. Do what it takes to come out the other side something more. Something greater than anything he could possibly create.

Forty six and two was his, finally. And now nothing could stop him.

“My friend, do you recall the child who was stolen from this facility?” Friend. A lark. A laugh. Another limitation. Another means to claim a human as an extension of one’s own ego.

“I thought you might like to see the fine young man he’s become these twenty odd years later.”

Ah, one who survived the old way. One who escaped the precious embrace of the shadows. A single drop of his blood made whole. A caterpillar, refusing the gift of flight.

“So, as thanks for bringing your pets to Insomnia, I’ve brought the boy to you.”

A boy. A label, a category, a box. One that was certainly comfortable. Trapping the form inside of it. Rest easy, soon Death will take you, box and all. And only your silhouette would remain. How simple it is, how easier it would be, to decay into the dirt and allow the cycle to continue.

But he would not.

“What’s the matter? Have you never seen a man turn before?” The caterpillar stared, such human fear and disgust levied at that which would take him so much higher. “If those Lucians hadn’t intervened, you could have turned, too.”

“Why me?” The caterpillar cried. Why must I dissolve, reform, bend to the will of the blood which birthed me?

Because you were created for it. Because you cannot stop it. Because the machine must fly, must consume, must continue to carry onwards. Stagnation is death, little insect. You feed the machine, whether you know it or not. Bending and bleeding for the Lucians, or wrenching and feeding for Niflheim. It makes no difference now. The cogs are still cogs, and your bones will still break between them all the same.

But how amusing, to see one fully formed. A vision of himself, left under a different set of rules and boundaries. Set aside from that which built him, broke him, made him into a God. A silhouette of himself. So meek. So timid. So _useless_.

“I am not one of your experiments!” Oh cry, little caterpillar. Wave you gun about in some pathetic attempt at asserting your pride, your ego, your sense of self separate from all else. Separate from the blood which nursed you into being.

The ascension has begun, you cannot stop it. Now, finish your Father’s work. Serve your maker one last time, lift that weapon to the pump that moves the blood which runs through both our veins. Pull the trigger, seal the fate. Kill the old, allow it to decompose, dissolve, deconstruct. And soon, oh so soon little caterpillar, you will see for yourself the might of a butterfly who remembers.

Now is my time.

**Author's Note:**

> @pandalots on twitter
> 
> bramblepeltao3.tumblr.com
> 
> And I feel the need to hype for my friend and musician, Professor Shyguy. [His cover of this song is superb.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ra7CFHzOxm8) And he has some final fantasy songs, too!


End file.
